At 11:51 AM 1/11/2004, Stefan Gybas <sgybas@debian.org> wrote:
Matt Zimmerman wrote:There doesn't seem to be any Debian representation in the talks at SHARE...II gave a talk about Debian/390 at a GSE (GUIDE SHARE Europe) meeting last year, but the visitors seemed more interested in commercial distributions that are promoted and supported by IBM. :-(At least GSE is a bit influenced by IBM (over 50% of the talks are normally given by IBM speakers) and you probably know as well as I do that IBM does not like Debian/390 very much. You will also find some talks about Flex-ES at these meetings but none about Hercules although everybody knows that Hercules is free and much better.Debian is not a company and does not have a contract with IBM, I guess that explains it all.
I can't speak for GSE, and I'm no longer in a position to speak for SHARE here in the USA, but SHARE has never had a problem with non-IBM speakers speaking at the conference. The back-and-forth tugs of war in the Networking projects between Cisco and IBM are legendary, and the VM projects have a long history of participation by vendors who compete with IBM, such as CA and Velocity Software.
If someone wants to offer a Debian talk for the NYC conference this summer, now is the time. By the end of March, the list of sessions for NYC will be fairly firm, but SHARE tends to welcome new speakers and new sessions on related topics. Speak up sooner, not later, but if you speak up, there's a fairly good chance a session on Debian would get scheduled.
If someone wants to set up a BoF on Debian at the Long Beach conference at the end of February, all it takes is one person saying, "I want to hold a BoF." No other attendees have no express any interest. I works a lot better if that person can schedule the BoF early in the week and makes a point of getting word out about it, but it's doable.
SHARE sessions happen because someone offers a session while there are still open slots on the grid. Sometimes the SHARE managers go out and recruit a speaker on a topic they "know" they need to cover, but they're always welcome to receive proposals for new sessions from speakers willing to give those sessions.
Stefan
Nick